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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c91b52e | You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It's just a fact of life. But I tell you one thing." "What's that?" "It sure makes you appreciate something like this when you know it could all go up in a puff of smoke." HOWE" | Bill Bryson | ||
| 58a7a0d | In some odd way that you don't understand and can't begin to articulate you feel and acquaintance with it--a familiarity on an unfamiliar level. Somewhere in the deep sediment of your being some long-dormant fragment of primordial memory, some little severed tail of DNA, has twitched or stirred. It is a motion much too faint to be understood or interpreted, but somehow you feel certain that this large, brooding, hypnotic presence has an imp.. | ayers-rock uluru | Bill Bryson | |
| da8be90 | The one thing he didn't do was discover the comet that bears his name. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e752718 | Once he inserted a bodkin - a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather - into his eye socket and rubbed it around 'betwixt my eye and the bone4 as near to [the] backside of my eye as I could' just to see what would happen. What happened, miraculously, was nothing - at least, nothing lasting. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 10036a9 | It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no "around" around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there--whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time does.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 52055ef | If you initialed one dollar per second, you would make $1,000 every seventeen minutes. After 12 days of nonstop effort you would acquire your first $1 million. Thus, it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days-- something over three years--to reach $100 million. After 31.7 years you would become a billionaire, and after almost a thousand years you would be as wealthy as Bill Gates. But not until after 31,709.8 years .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| eb77c1d | In the country inns of a small corner of northern Germany, in the spur of land connecting Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark, you can sometimes hear people talking in what sounds eerily like a lost dialect of English. Occasional snatches of it even make sense, as when they say that the "veather ist cold" or inquire of the time by asking, "What ist de clock?" According to Professor Hubertus Menke, head of the German Department at Kiel University,.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| fbd44f5 | I hate asking directions. I am always afraid that the person I approach will step back and say, 'You want to go where? The centre of Brussels? Boy, are you lost. This is Lille, you dumb shit,' then stop other passers-by and say, 'You wanna hear something classic? Buddy, tell these people where you think you are,' and that I'll have to push my way through a crowd of people who are falling about and wiping tears of mirth from their eyes. So I.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 33929aa | It is easy to overlook the thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point.We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 3892982 | The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether--very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio, but for the moment reading remained most people's principal method for filling idle time. Each year, American publishers produced 110 million books, more than 10,000 separate titles, double the number of ten years before. For those who felt daunted by such a welter of.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e8d08b1 | Occasionally, he would exclaim over a view or regard with admiration some passing marvel of nature, but mostly to him hiking was a tiring, dirty, pointless slog between distantly spaced comfort zones. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c06f891 | What a joy walking is. All the cares of life, all the hopeless, inept fuckwits that God has strewn along the Bill Bryson Highway of Life, suddenly seem far away and harmless, and the world becomes tranquil and welcoming and good. And to walk with old friends multiplies the pleasure a hundredfold. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 25eeaed | Perforated eardrums were quite common16, too; but, as Haldane reassuringly noted in one of his essays, 'the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 75fa8ec | Perhaps the most irrational fashion act of all was the male habit for 150 years of wearing wigs. Samuel Pepys, as with so many things, was in the vanguard, noting with some apprehension the purchase of a wig in 1663 when wigs were not yet common. It was such a novelty that he feared people would laugh at him in church; he was greatly relieved, and a little proud, to find that they did not. He also worried, not unreasonably, that the hair of.. | humor wigs | Bill Bryson | |
| f4de691 | What never fails to astonish at Skara Brae is the sophistication. These were the dwellings of Neolithic people, but the houses had locking doors, a system of drainage and even, it seems, elemental plumbing with slots in the walls to sluice away wastes. The interiors were capacious. The walls, still standing, were up to ten feet high, so they afforded plenty of headroom, and the floors were paved. Each house has built-in stone dressers, stor.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 8d74193 | H. L. Mencken called it "the one authentic rectum of civilization," but for most people Hollywood was a place of magic. In 1927, the iconic sign on the hillside above the city actually said HOLLYWOODLAND. It had been erected in 1923 to advertise a real estate development and had nothing to do with motion pictures. The letters, each over forty feet high, were in those days also traced out with electric lights. (The LAND was removed in 1949.).. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4e621a8 | Linguist say parties in the conversation will tolerate silence for four seconds before interjecting anything, however unrelated. | speech | Bill Bryson | |
| 9823370 | I suppose--I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on. | Bill Bryson | ||
| dc2ee1e | You can't go to East Anglia and not visit Sutton Hoo. Well, you can, obviously, but you shouldn't. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 970ee47 | As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: "In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time." -- | Bill Bryson | ||
| cac4ab4 | By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn't exist. | Bill Bryson | ||
| cd6f919 | Scheele independently discovered eight elements--chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen--but received credit for none of them in his lifetime. He had an unfortunate habit of tasting every substance he worked with, as a way of familiarizing himself with its properties, and eventually the practice caught up with him. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 66fcc82 | Truth, of itself, does not kill. | Janny Wurts | ||
| 7970764 | The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can't adequately imagine, in conformance with Einstein's theory of relativity (which we will get to in due course). For the moment it is enough to know that we are not adrift in some large, ever-expanding bubble. Rather, space curves, in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite. Space cannot even properly be said to be expanding because, as the physicist and Nobel laureate S.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6dbf1b4 | Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was at the time American consul in Liverpool, provided a preface, then almost instantly wished he hadn't, for the book was universally regarded by reviewers as preposterous hokum. Hawthorne under questioning admitted that he hadn't actually read it. "This shall be the last of my benevolent follies, and I will never be kind to anybody again as long as [I] live," he vowed in a letter to a friend." | Bill Bryson | ||
| b8c936b | What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children's parties--I daresay it would even give a merry toot--and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ef69186 | I had a hangover you could sell to science, | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7732ccc | Although there was no reliable way of dating periods, there was no shortage of people willing to try. The most well known early attempt30 was made in 1650, when Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on 23 October 4004 BC, an assertion that has amused historians.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| a6613ea | What made this particularly interesting is that John Howard is by far the dullest man in Australia. Imagine a very committed funeral home director - someone whose burning ambition from the age of eleven was to be a funeral home director, whose proudest achievement in adulthood was to be elected president of the Queanbeyan and District Funeral Home Directors' Association - then halve his personality and halve it again, and you have pretty we.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| a4c20ac | In fact, there is no point in trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on and around you always, in numbers you can't conceive. If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains--about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin. They are there to dine off the ten billion or so flakes of skin you shed every day, plus all .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ed3ffe6 | The most splendid thing about the Amish is the names they give their towns. Everywhere else in America towns are named either after the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave. But the Amish obviously gave the matter of town names some thought and graced their communities with intriguing, not to say provocative, appellations: Blue Ball, Bird in Hand, and Intercourse, to name but three. Intercourse makes a good living by .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2a58b72 | Yet it would be nearly impossible to overstate Lyell's influence. The Principles of Geology went through twelve editions in his lifetime and contained notions that shaped geological thinking far into the twentieth century. Darwin took a first edition with him on the Beagle voyage and wrote afterwards that 'the great merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of one's mind, and therefore that, when seeing a thing never seen b.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 27cd436 | Looking for a supernova, therefore, was a little like standing on the observation platform of the Empire State Building with a telescope and searching windows around Manhattan in the hope of finding, let us say, someone lighting a twenty-first birthday cake. | science | Bill Bryson | |
| c431910 | The author reveals a cultural change that took place when clergy were paid based on a tax on the land's value rather than what it produced. This meant that, while parishioners could suffer through a terrible year, clergy would always have a comfortable one. | detachment ministry suffering | Bill Bryson | |
| 28e4fea | Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms--up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested--probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figur.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| bcc2805 | In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition - either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit - that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7f4069d | Life emerged so swiftly, in fact, that some authorities think it must have had help--perhaps a good deal of help. | Bill Bryson | ||
| e613e12 | For the first 99.99999 per cent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees. Virtually nothing is known about the prehistory of chimpanzees, but whatever they were, we were. Then, about seven million years ago, something major happened. A group of new beings emerged from the tropical forests of Africa and began to move about on the open savanna. These | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9e3de55 | It is natural to suppose that global warming would act as a useful counterweight to the Earth's tendency to plunge back into glacial conditions. However, as Kolbert has pointed out, when you are confronted with a fluctuating and unpredictable climate, 'the last thing you'd want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it'. It has even been suggested, with more plausibility than would at first seem evident, that an ice age might ac.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c726e62 | H. L. Mencken called it "the one authentic rectum of civilization," but for most people Hollywood was a place of magic." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 6c09387 | America has given us a pretty decent modern world and doesn't always get enough thanks for that. But for reasons that genuinely escape me, it has also become spectacularly accommodating to stupidity. Where | Bill Bryson | ||
| d74bfe3 | Suddenly we were in Hawaii--tropical mountains running down to sparkling seas, sweeping bays, flawless beaches guarded by listing palms, little green and rocky islands standing off the headlands. From time to time we drove through sunny canefields, overlooked by the steep, blue eminence of the Great Dividing Range. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1b6ebb5 | The English team's revisions showed that the Cambrian had been a time of unparalleled innovation and experimentation in body designs. For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today. Name a creature, from a nematode worm to Cameron Diaz, and they.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 89c66e9 | I passed the time browsing in the windows of the many tourists shops that stand along it, reflecting on what a lot of things the Scots have given the world--kilts, bagpipes, tam-o'-shanters, tins of oatcakes, bright yellow sweaters with big diamond patterns, sacks of haggis--and how little anyone but a Scot would want them. Let | Bill Bryson |